An IoT based Warehouse Intrusion Detection (E-Perimeter) and Grain Tracking Model for Food Reserve Agency

Abstract

Zambia’s agricultural sector through Food Reserve Agency (FRA) while still underdeveloped faces many challenges that range from marketing, spoilage, infestations, and theft at site, spillage and storage among others. The methods used by FRA in their business processes are largely manual as there are no systems in place. In order to help curb these problems, this paper proposed and developed novel methods that can be used to sense real-time warehouse intrusion and grain tracking within the FRA circulation. The IoT based prototype model made use of the APC220 transceiver, GSM, GPRS, RFID, PIR and cloud storage. To curb theft of grain at storage points, the system used motion sensing through the use of PIR sensors, wireless radio communication module and the GSM/GPRS technologies such that when anyone comes in the range of PIR sensor, then the sensor will send a logic signal to the microcontroller. Lastly, the RFID combined with GSM and Arduino microcontroller responsible for grain tracking. From the results obtained in the experiment conducted it is believed that once this technology is adopted, theft will be reduced and grain management in the FRA satellite Depots dotted around the country will improve.